The Revolution Will Be Feminist Or It Won't BeLa Revolucion Será Feminista o No Será

This work takes its title, The revolution will be feminist or it won’t be, from the slogan of the feminist group inside the Occupy (Indignados) movement that took place in Spain in 2011. While the slogan of the feminists was claiming that no progress can be achieved without equal rights, the motto was largely misunderstood and the feminists were unwelcome and unsupported by other groups of the same movement.

This work positions sexist postcards from the 70’s until the early 2000’s, alongside images of today’s economic and socio-political landscape in Spain. While the postcards document the pre-crisis unsustainable economic strategy based on the property bubble and the sexist culture associated with that development plan, the post-crisis images depict the current civic and political movements in Spain focusing on key feminist leaders such as the current mayor of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, and Barcelona, Ada Colau.

The revolution will be feminist or it won’t be documents the transformation in the political culture of Spain drawing a parallel between the pre and post crisis economy and political culture.

Change is now and it is with usEl cambio es ahora y con nosotras

Since the last years of Franco’s dictatorship in the late seventies, until the decline of the property bubble in 2008, Spain’s economic growth was based on house building and tourism. In 2005, 800.000 houses were built in Spain, more than the total number of houses built in the UK, France and Germany together in the same year. This overambitious and unrealistic plan was not aiming to satisfy the national demand for houses, it was grounded on the hope of selling Spain as an affordable paradise.

The national selling proposition was to present Spain as a hedonistic place to European tourists, but the whole economic strategy didn’t have any equitable and sustainable dimension, in terms of finances and also in terms of environmental impact, social justice and civil rights. In 2008, the world financial crisis peaked, Spain’s economy shrank and the fantasy ended.

From 1996 to 2007, 6 million jobs were created in the house building market, but from 2007 to 2008 1.1 million of those jobs were lost. This led to an in-depth review of the economic strategy along with its political, social and environmental dimensions and by 2014 there were three new political forces called Ciudadanos(Citizens), Podemos (We Can), and Compromis (Engaged). Candidates with sustainable and equitable programmes gained popularity and in 2015 Manuela Carmena and Ada Colau became mayors of Madrid and Barcelona, the feminist (r)evolution took place.